MAGAZINE is an American feminist magazine co-founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem and founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin together with founding editors Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, and Mary Peacock, that first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. The first stand-alone issue appeared in January 1972. From July 1972 to 1987, it appeared on a monthly basis. During its heyday in the 1970s it enjoyed great popularity, but was not always able to reconcile its ideological concerns with commercial considerations.

Ms. made history when it published the names of women admitting to having had abortions when the procedure was still illegal in most of the United States. Running before the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the 1972 statement was an action of civil disobedience.
A 1976 cover story on battered women made Ms. the first national magazine to address the issue of domestic violence. The cover photo featured a woman with a bruised face.
Ms. magazine's credibility was damaged in the 80s and 90s when it became swept up in the day care sexual abuse frenzy and moral panic about Satanic ritual abuse.

Our goal at Ms. was to make such lives visible, to honor women's work, and to expose the legal, economic, and social barriers that stand in the way of women's full humanity. Ms. provided a forum where disparate voices - housewives, lesbians, political radicals, cancer survivors, victims of rape, violence, and incest, brave feminist trouble-makers - could be heard on issues that were being ignored by mainstream women's magazines and papered over by "feminine" propriety in the public square. Ms. showcased women writers and artists. We publicized grass-roots organizations and local feminist leaders. We reported on street demonstrations, consciousness- raising groups, cutting-edge lawsuits, and legislative initiatives. We advocated for the beleaguered and the silenced. We were rabble-rousers. We helped make a revolution.
Letty Cottin Pogrebin

BIOGRAPHIES

loria Marie Steinem
(born March 25, 1934) is an American feminist, journalist, and social and political activist.
Rising to national prominence as a feminist leader in 1969, Steinem was a columnist at New York magazine in the 1960s and broke ground in 1963 with an investigative report of how the women of Playboy were treated, which was made into a 1985 movie, A Bunny's Tale. In the 1970s she became a leading political leader and one of the most important heads of the second-wave feminism, the women's rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1971, Steinem, along with other feminist leaders (including Betty Friedan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Myrlie Evers, and U.S. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Bella Abzug) founded the National Women's Political Caucus. An influential co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered her memorable "Address to the Women of America." The next year Steinem became the founding editor and publisher of Ms. magazine, which brought feminist issues to the forefront and became the movement's most influential publication. When the first regular issue hit the news stands in July 1972, its 300,000 "one-shot" test copies sold out nationwide in three days. Steinem even labeled it Spring Issue 1972 for that sole reason. It generated an astonishing 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters within weeks.

Steinem actively campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, in addition to other laws and social reforms that promoted equality including same-sex marriage. She also founded or co-founded many groups, including the Women's Action Alliance, the Coalition of Labor Union Women, the Women's Media Center, and Choice USA, and she is also a prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Today, Steinem is considered, along with Betty Friedan, the most important feminist reformer of the Second-Wave of the Women's Movement in the United States.

etty Cottin Pogrebin
(born June 9, 1939) is an American writer and journalist. She graduated from Brandeis University and became a writer and feminist advocate in the early 1970s. In 1971, she was one of the founding editors of Ms. Magazine, where she worked for 17 years, and a co-founder of the National Women's Political Caucus. She was also a consultant on Free to Be… You and Me and edited Stories for Free Children.

Pogrebin is a well-known advocate for feminist, Jewish, and Jewish-feminist causes, as well as a political activist on topics such as hunger, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and African American-Jewish relations. Her publications include Getting Yours: How to Make the System Work for the Working Woman; Growing Up Free: Raising Your Child in the 80s; Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America; and Three Daughters.

ea Feitler
Beatriz Feitler was born in Brazil, the country to which her parents emigrated during World War II. She received a traditionalist education, and then spent her college years at the Parsons School of Design, graduating in 1959. Back in Rio de Janeiro, she founded Estudio G, which specialized in poster, record album, and book design, and worked on the design of Senhor, a Brazilian magazine committed to innovative graphics and design.

In 1961, Marvin Isreal, one of Feitler's teachers, invited 23-year-old Feitler alongside Ruth Ansel to join her as assistants, and finally art directors at Harper's Bazaar.
Feitler and Ansel remained true to the tradition of designing magazines as a harmonious and cinematic whole, while responding to events in the streets of the time. E.g. the April 1965 Bazaar cover with Richard Avedon's photograph of Jean Shrimpton - peering from behind a bright pink Day-Glo space helmet with the logo vibrating against it in acid green - has been often reproduced as an emblem of the sixties.

Feitler lasted an amazing 10 years working the offices of Bazaar until May 1972, when she left to work with Gloria Steinem in launching new Ms. Magazine. At Ms. Feitler made an indelible mark upon the face of American graphic design. Her deep interest in all of the arts was catalytic in expanding the magazine's scope to include cultural coverage.

A six-year association with Rolling Stone began in 1975. Feitler redesigned its format twice: in 1977 for its tenth-anniversary issue featuring the stunning photographs of Annie Leibovitz; and again in 1981 when it shifted from a tabloid to the current magazine format.

Even while art directing major magazines, Feitler had influential book jacket, album cover and book design projects under way. From 1974 until 1980, Feitler taught advanced students at the School of Visual Arts, among them e.g. Keith Haring, whom she strongly encouraged in his development.

Her final project was the premiere issue of the revived Vanity Fair, which appeared after her death in 1982, that was caused by a rare form of cancer at the age of only 44 years.

"In one sense, Feitler was always the original feminist," recalls her longtime associate Carl Barile, who worked with her at Bazaar, Ms., Rolling Stone and on the premiere issue of Vanity Fair, "but her decision to go to Ms. was made because she saw it as an opportunity to be creative and do innovative work." Her feminism was of the "treat everyone equally" school rather than the militant. And innovate, she did, with editorial designs as startling for the time as the articles appearing in Ms. Feitler used Day-Glo inks, established unique signature formats for various sections of Ms. and mixed photography with illustration. Her typography would be expressionistic and uninhibited. She was willing to cross the line separating the tried and true from the risky and unproved. Many art directors are unwilling to cross this line until fad and fashion certify its acceptability, but Bea Feitler would reach across and return with a novelty face, a decorated letter or a hopelessly eccentric form which happened to be just right for the message at hand. Conventional wisdom decrees that all-type magazine covers are newsstand disaster, but Fietler rattled marketing and outraged some with revisionist scripture on the all-type Ms. cover declaring "Peace on earth, good will to people" in pink and green Day-Glo. It sold out on the newsstands in December 1972. Ms. followed up with a neon-sign version in December 1973.
Her South American heritage influenced her design sensibility about color. She told assistant, "Trust me, listen to me, I know," while replacing their color selections with vibrant contrasting hues.
At Ms. Feitler made an indelible mark upon the face of American graphic design. Her deep interest in all of the arts was catalytic in expanding the magazine's scope to include cultural coverage. Perhaps she sensed that she was making history by graphically defining a movement and a cultural revolution. But she did not see Ms. and her graphics as the parochial product of strident feminism, she saw them as an all-people movement. Not disenfranchising males who traditionally dominated the culture, but enfranchising those who had been left out. Not only did she commission art and photography from image makers of reputation and renown, she also commissioned art from fine artists, housewives from Brooklyn who made art or crafts and took the subway over to show her their work, and yes from men. She made time for those who showed her their work, and pondered whether their unique and even modest gifts might somehow make a point or provide a counterpoint.